A little while back we reported on the eight years worth of Mayor Ray Nagin’s missing e-mails. Now, I come across another strory about technical foul-ups in the city (although the e-mail deal may not have actually been a foul-up). It seems that, a few years back, the city spent $6 million to install cameras in some of the more, let’s say, unstable neighborhoods in an effort to crack down on crime.

So, how well has this program been protecting the citizens? About as well as the Saints’ defense did last year protecting the scoreboard. (For the record, they were tied for 5th worst in the NFL. So maybe in fact they did slightly better than the cameras.) Depending on who you believe, these cameras have caught either none or one criminal since they were deployed. The city claims one, but that may have been from a camera owned by a citizen and the city is just taking credit for it.

The problem: it seems that most of the time, these cameras are either not working or producing videos so fuzzy that they can’t even identify the criminals. A teenager can make a better You-Tube video while he’s riding a stunt bike.

Perhaps the city should have hired a technology chief whose skills were at least slightly above a neandrathal’s (with due apologies to the Geico cavemen). Or at least it should have been somebody besides Greg Meffert, whose skills were more in the area of graft than in gadgets.

I’ll tell you how the city could have saved a whole bunch of money and made a serious dent in the crime rate. Instead of cameras, they could have brought in a bunch of retired Catholic school nuns to patrol the streets. If they’re anything like my old 6th grade teacher, Sister Candida, they have more eyes on their heads than a potato that’s been in the pantry for three weeks. They could spot a perpetrator in an instant and quickly demobilize him with a well placed eraser shot to the temple from thirty yards. Then, she’d single-handedly drag him by his earlobe straight to the principal’s office- I mean, police station.

Anyone who’s ever attended a Catholic grade school would agree with me here that such a plan would make New Orleans one of the safest cities in the nation.